Unlocked Greek New Testament

The objectives of this project are to provide a Greek New Testament that:

• Is free of copyright and licensing restrictions (public domain / CC0), permitting the entire global Church to use and build on it without hindrance.
• Is based on existing work of excellent pedigree and academic repute.
• Is morphologically parsed and lexically tagged.

Description

The process for determining the text of the UGNT will be as follows:

1. All mss. dated 400 A.D. or earlier will be examined. This currently includes 79 papyri, 38 uncial manuscripts, 1 ostracon (all considered Class 1) and 60 other documents (inscriptions, amulets, talismans, quotations) (called Class 2).
2. Variants which are only spelling variations of the same word are considered to be the same word.
3. Corrected and uncorrected readings in a ms., if both dated 400 or earlier, will be examined and their readings considered as separate witnesses.
4. Where all witness agree, the text is assumed to be established.
5. Where the witnesses disagree, the majority reading is taken as the text, and the minority placed in the apparatus.
6. In the case of a tie, both readings from a ms. which has been corrected will be removed from the count.
7. If a tie continues, Class 2 documents will be removed from the count.
8. If a tie continues, the dating of the mss. will be considered and the reading found in the earlier of the Class 1 witnesses will be taken.
9. Spelling will follow that found in the earliest witnesses, which quite often agrees with Westcott-Hort.

UGNT will be released in versions.

1. The starting point will be Westcott-Hort's 1881 text.
2. On the first pass through, WH text will be changed to reflect the reading determined from the steps enumerated above. The apparatus will only reflect where it disagrees with WH and the WH reading will go in the apparatus.
3. On the second pass through, the results of the steps enumerated above will be checked for a second time and the apparatus will list which mss. support each of the readings. Also, passages which seem to warrant further investigation (especially where the new text disagrees with accepted modern critical texts) will be flagged to be examined in the third pass.
4. On the third pass, the apparatus will also list where UGNT differs from other printed texts (NA28, SBLGNT, RP, TR and perhaps others). The final reading of the more complex passages will be resolved and the process of decision-making documented.

UGNT will be morphologically tagged, most likely using either the MorphGNT tagging system or Robinson-Pierpont's.

UGNT will be lexically tagged both to Strong's and the UGL.

Resources used or consulted in this project

Greek New Testament texts

• Nestle1904 is the base text of the project: https://github.com/biblicalhumanities/Nestle1904
• Robinson-Pierpont: https://github.com/biblicalhumanities/Byzantine-Textform-Robinson-Pierpont-2005;
• SBLGNT: https://github.com/biblicalhumanities/sblgnt;
• Tischendorf: https://github.com/biblicalhumanities/tischendorf;
• Tregelles: http://www.tyndalehouse.com/tregelles/index.html
• Scrivener's
• Westcott-Hort
• Von Soden
• Manuscripts 01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, 011 and 032

Related projects

Unlocked Greek Lexicon - https://github.com/unfoldingWord/Unlocked-Greek-Lexicon